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July 20, 2010
The idea that the state can play a significant role in its citizens’ lives without imperiling their liberties is a core tenet of social democracy that the ALP has defended, and often breached. 'Defend' is a key word here.
The ALP is on the defensive ---preserving the institutions, legislation, services and rights that we have inherited from the 20th-century reform, most notably the welfare state which helped to civilise capitalism. It does by deploying a politics of fear. Defend is a key word because in the context of climate change traditional social democracy looks to have exhausted itself.
In this excerpt in the New York Review of Books from his Ill Fares the Land Tony Judt says:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.
He adds that much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.
He adds:
We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.
If in public policy social democrats believe in the possibility and virtue of collective action for the collective good, then they have failed badly in terms of addressing climate change. The ALP critiques those who extol the virtues of deregulation, the minimal state, and low taxation, defends the public sector on grounds of collective interest and challenges those in the Liberal Party and business who say that the point of life is to get rich and that governments exist to facilitate this.
But the ALP has beat a tactical retreat on climate change, even though Australia citizens need the resources of the state to adapt to global warming and they need the state to protect them from the consequences of a hot and parched world.
The ALP knows that climate change cannot be addressed by unregulated markets (unfettered capitalism) or individual action, but it has been crippled by fear from the campaign waged by the climate-change deniers who have rejected the science of global warming, embraced junk science and whose key bullet point is that global warming is some sort of giant intellectual fraud hatched by Leftists and Greenies to destroy industrial society.
Has social democracy exhausted itself?
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Mike Gonzalez, Vice President of Communications for Heritage Foundation, a conservative US think tank indicates how far the conservative movement has gone of the deep end. He says on his blog that proposals for a a “cap-and-trade” scheme rest on a single assumption.
The IPCC report was a summary of existing scientific literature — its conclusions are those of the world’s scientists. What Gonzales is doing here with his phrase to “turn this assumption into fact" is to completely rejection of any concept of a scientific method: a procedure by which ideas (hypotheses) may be tested against the real world and either rejected or found to be true.
For him the the idea that humans burning fossil fuels are causing the world to warm is merely an opinion.